Gateway Cinephiles

Little Blossoms Adrift

Treeless Mountain
2008 (USA / Korea)
Director: So Yong Kim
Viewed: June 17, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

[Treeless Mountain was recently featured in a limited engagement on June 17-19, 2009 at the Webster University Film Series.]

Films about childhood abound, but So Yong Kim’s delicate, affecting Treeless Mountain is a rarer thing: a film whose principal psychological attribute is its profound empathy for children, in a manner that never condescends or romanticizes.  Painting in short strokes, Kim establishes an emotional wilderness of school-age loneliness, anxiety, and disillusionment.  Seven-year-old protagonist Jin (Hee-yeon Kim) stands at the center of the film’s story and visual language, but Kim, evincing a masterful talent for understated characterization and narrative, maintains a prudent and slightly saddened distance from her subject.  She plumbs Jin’s inner life by observing her face’s restless contortions and her responses to the exasperating dilemmas that vex her and her little sister, Bin (Song-hee Kim).  Kim’s approach gently elevates the film from a poignantly observed tale of childhood, which would have been enough to satisfy, to an astonishingly mature examination of the ways in which naive expectations shape one’s day-to-day habits, emotional topography, and interactions with others.

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Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

Up
2009 (USA)
Director: Pete Docter
Viewed: June 18, 2009
Format: 3D Theatrical Print

One of the most pleasurable aspects of Pixar’s rise to the artistic apex of American commercial cinema has been the expanding sophistication of the themes that the studio is willing, even eager, to tackle.  That sophistication reached its pinnacle to date in last year’s WALL•E, an unexpectedly stirring film experience that addressed myriad science fiction concerns with a grace, liveliness, and humor unmatched by any genre offering in recent decades.  This trend—the studio’s determination to make the most challenging kid-friendly fare the public will accept—first emerged with Monsters, Inc., so it should come as little shock that that film’s director, Pete Docter, has delivered yet another feature whose breathtaking surface conceals deep currents.  If Up feels slightly less groundbreaking than Pixar’s recent offerings in terms of sensory dazzle, perhaps that’s because the comparison is so monstrously unfair.  Standing alongside the virtuoso direction and cinematography of Ratatouille, or the futurist vistas and elegant storytelling of WALL•E, Up is merely marvelous, rather than devastatingly marvelous.  However, Docter delivers what is the studio’s most essentially human story since Monsters, and certainly its most mature in terms of its psychological resonance.  Woven into a relatively straightforward tale of adventure, Up offers a poignant examination of how the reality of everyday life can gnaw at our dreams and seed cynicism in our hearts, tragically hardening us to the possibility of emotional connections with other people.

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Quick Review: Tyson

2008 (USA)
Director: James Toback
Viewed: June 13, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

It’s tempting to dismiss James Toback’s absorbing documentary Tyson as an unapologetic hagiography of former heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson.  The film is narrated and produced by the champ himself, and it doesn’t merely gloss over Tyson’s rape conviction, but permits him to hurl insults at his alleged victim.  Yet Toback’s canny approach does much more than solidify a sympathetic characterization of the man.  The director interviews Tyson from an indulgent distance, using the footage as the key component of an ambitious and unexpectedly personalized tale.  Tyson recounts his life and expounds on his views in sprawling monologues replete with malapropisms, upwellings of rage, and moments of poetic clarity.  Toback’s camera swallows Tyson’s version of events whole, but also devours his eccentricities and slumbering-lion features with a blend of awe and puzzlement.  Refreshingly, the director is less concerned with hewing to a Fallen Sports Hero narrative arc than capturing the specifics of his subject matter with passion.  The film reinforces the enduring wonder of Tyson’s athleticism with a triumphal style, but offers its revelations in a reserved manner, allowing the viewer the freedom to mull over, discount, or titter at them.

That Certain Female

The Girlfriend Experience
2009 (USA)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Viewed: June 9, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Perhaps unexpectedly, Steven Soderbergh’s lean, chilly The Girlfriend Experience shares two key elements with the director’s previous film, the four-hour biopic Che: an admirable lack of artistic compromise and a thematic nucleus that is oddly straightforward given the elaborate character of the presentation.  Once again stepping away from his brand of pleasurable, blissfully hip commercial fare to create a film wholly on his own terms, Soderbergh brings his talents to bear on a relatively simple story of entrepreneurial and sexual peril that plays out in the hotels, restaurants, and boutiques of Manhattan.  Perhaps “story” is the wrong word.  In contrast to Che’s grand, exhaustive study of revolution as process, Girlfriend barely bothers with a plot.  Or, more accurately, the plot is so thoroughly fragmented that the film’s events and their relationship to one another are plainly not Girlfriend’s focus.  (This alone is a fascinating departure for the director of the Ocean’s films, where the elaborate heists are the Whole Point.)  Employing a structure that one could term “narrative cut-up,” Soderbergh slices and dices the life of a New York call girl in October 2008 into a collage of cinematic musings on self-worth, loyalty, and autonomy.

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It Burns, Burns, Burns

Drag Me to Hell
2009 (USA)
Director: Sam Raimi
Viewed: June 7, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Horror films with a camp sensibility are a dime a dozen, but outright giddy horror is a much more elusive creature.  In his much-ballyhooed return to the form after a seventeen-year hiatus (if we disregard 2002’s The Gift), director Sam Raimi delivers the latter species in Drag Me to Hell, a wicked delight so gratifyingly realized that calling it a “genre exercise” seems faint praise.  While its title suggests exploitation schlock in the vein of Die Screaming, Marianne and I Spit on Your Grave, the trappings of Raimi’s film are standard occult thriller fare.  The tone, however, summons forth the nightmarish, absurdist character that was previously endemic to the Evil Dead films.  Also evident is the bleak, even malevolent worldview that emerges from Raimi’s smaller (read: non-Spider-man) films, from Darkman to A Simple Plan.  Exhibiting both tremendous confidence and a ravenous appetite for unholy fun, Drag Me to Hell deserves better than a soft-mouthed label like “tribute” or “throwback.”  Let’s be clear: It’s a damn fine horror film in every way.

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The Spoils of Life

Summer Hours (L’heure d’été)
2008 (France)
Director: Olivier Assayas
Viewed: June 2, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

The genre of family drama comes prepackaged with certain expectations regarding the rhythm and features of the narrative.  The story will periodically spark and flare under the pressures of conflicting personalities, unresolved angst, and outright toxic behavior.  There will be tragedies, often several of them, and secrets will emerge from musty closets.  Invigorating cinema can be made from such dross—witness Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married from just last year, which did Deliciously Ugly quite well.  Rare, however, is the film that discovers drama within a family experience without reference to the genre’s usual, ruthless patterns.  Here is such a work: Olivier Assayas’ delicate, dauntless Summer Hours, a marvelous film that will upend the viewer’s expectations time and again.  It is not the sort of cinema that offers smug familial warmth, or a free-fall of despair, or awe at the “boldness” of its directorial vision.  It is, however, a work of profound beauty, with a meticulous awareness for time, spaces, objects, and emotions.  It invites us to spend a year or so with an extended clan of educated, cultured people and witness their wary navigation of life, especially the parts that make the heart ache.  Sound dull?  Perish the thought.

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A One-Way Trip

Goodbye Solo
2008 (USA)
Director: Ramin Bahrani
Viewed: May 21, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

With the plaintive, graceful Goodbye Solo, director Ramin Bahrani offers his take on the hoary trope of two outsiders connecting under unusual circumstances, here in the form of Senegalese-American cab driver Solo (Soleymane Sy Savane) and his elderly white passenger, William (Red West).  It’s an odd choice for Bahrani, given that the filmmaker’s two previous feature films—Man Push Cart and Chop Shop—are regarded as masterpieces of contemporary neo-realism, eschewing traditional narrative for immersion in the routines and everyday joys and tragedies of their characters.  Solo takes a less oblique approach, urging us forward through a story engineered for melodramatic sparks.  The dour William slides into the back of Solo’s cab one night on the grubby streets of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and offers the cabbie $1,000 if, two weeks hence, he will drive him to Blowing Rock, a mountain peak famed for its devilish updrafts.  From the germ of this odd transaction, which makes the garrulous Solo uneasy, a lively, troubled relationship sprouts over the course of the following days.  Through most of its running time, Goodbye Solo is genuinely engaging in a way that has nothing to do with its plot, which flirts with triteness in places and appears unfortunately shapeless in others.  What mesmerizes is the way that Bahrani tells the story, with breathtaking subtlety and a serene astonishment for the particulars of character and place.  Despite Solo’s ceaseless, probing patter, the film discovers its finest moments in its silences, and in the long, wordless gazes its two protagonists share.

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Long-Lived Rock

Anvil!: The Story of Anvil
2008 (USA)
Director: Sacha Gervasi
Viewed: May 13, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Much of the charm that vibrates in the bones of Sacha Gervasi’s amused, melancholy documentary, Anvil!: The Story of Anvil, is premised on the oddly ambiguous definition of success in the rock world.  Sure, the eponymous Canadian metal group, now twenty-odd years past its peak in popularity, might be a failure by any yardstick one might select.  Financially, they are a broke.  Artistically, they’re stuck on the cutting edge of 1982.  Culturally, their name evokes the response, “Who?”  (Though not from metal luminaries such as Slash and Lars Ulrich, who in the film’s introduction hold forth on Anvil’s key role during the early days of the genre.)  Listen carefully, however, to lead guitarist and vocalist Steve “Lips” Kudlow’s rambling, armchair philosophical assessment of the setbacks that have bedeviled the band.  Simultaneously painfully self-aware and laughably oblivious, Kudlow is relentlessly optimistic about Anvil’s success, even though he lacks a coherent conception of what that success might look like.  Depending on the moment and his mood, “success” might mean cultural relevance, uncompromised integrity, a packed house, or an honest living.  Regardless, one gets the sense that he will know it when he sees it.  Despite first-time director Gervasi’s gawking at the band’s fundamentally kitschy character and its sad predicament, the thematic heart of Anvil! is humane stuff: success is a slippery thing, and the dogged pursuit of such an ineffable goal is rife with dizzying highs and miserable lows.

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Quick Review: 12

2007 (Russia)
Director: Nikita Mikhalkov
Viewed: May 3, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Director Nikita Mikhalkov has tackled a “re-imagining” of the archetypal Serious American Drama with verve, slashing up the most conspicuous aspects of Twelve Angry Men, particularly its claustrophobic narrative and staging under Sidney Lumet.  While Mikhalkov’s 12 is far too graceless to stand at the same podium as Reginald Rose’s seminal legal fable, the new film is provocative in its use of expansive flashbacks and long, personal monologues from the jurors.  Notably, 12 swaps Henry Fonda’s rational, persuasive Juror No. 8 for an anxious second-guesser, whose own experiences prohibit a rash decision about the defendant’s fate.  One senses that Mikhalkov is both paying tribute to and riffing on Lumet’s palatable moralizing, not to mention the American judicial system so routinely fetishized in fiction.  While the film takes its facile swipes at apathy and racism, it also poses more probing questions about the limits of speculation, culpability, and civic obligation. For these reasons, 12 is a worthy Russian response film to an iconic work of American drama, despite its often clumsy gestures towards humanizing grit.  Never mind his silly flourishes and narrative dead-ends; Mikhalkov deserves praise for reconfiguring a lionized story within a new milieu, adding curiosities and complexity.

In the Eye of the Beholder

Everlasting Moments (Eviga Ögonblick)
2008 (Sweden)
Director: Jan Troell
Viewed: May 2, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Fundamentally, I am a sucker for any film that approaches the romantic impulse as an agonizing phenomenon that bears unbearably fragile dividends, when it bears anything at all save tears.  For me, there is something unaccountably attractive in the bliss of thwarted love.  It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that Everlasting Moments, Jan Troell’s scrupulously reverent tale of stifled artistic expression and romance, proved to be emotionally engrossing despite its schematic narrative and discursive character.  The relationship between Swedish housewife / amateur photographer Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) and camera shopkeeper Sebastian Pedersen (Jesper Christensen) is tragic, succulent stuff.  Their unconsummated love, exquisitely formal yet accented with moments of profound tenderness, is so plainly rife with repressed yearnings and resentments that it’s a wonder mere Scandinavian starch can restrain such ache.  In part, familial obligations keep the couple apart, but it wouldn’t be a textbook romantic tragedy without a violent and jealous spouse, a role played here by Maria’s mercurial, monstrous husband Sigfrid (Mikael Persbrandt).  It’s not sufficient that Sigfrid restrain Maria within a living hell of drunkenness, infidelity, abuse, and murderous threats.  He also attempts to quash her blossoming creative longings behind the camera, a desire that serves as both a gateway to and an expression of her feelings for the gentle Sebastian.  Love doesn’t come much more virtuous—or more doomed—than this.

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